Quick recap: D-bomb 2/1/09. OM +/- 12/08. WAW moved out 7/09. OM dumped her 8/09. WAW made noise about "seeing if" 8/09 (wotta co-inky-dink!). SP did not reciprocate noise in approved way 9/09. New OM 10/1/09. D finalized est 2/1/10.
After doing all the wrong things, I started doing the DB things. Went out on some casual dates as described above after, roughly 4 months. Meh -- first dates. They were what they were.
Started chatting online with a woman I grew up with, haven't seen in 20+ years. She is gong thru D as well. Kindred, misery loves company, what-have-you. Met, did the wild thing; met again, did the wild thing again; now we meet and do the wild thing every 2 months or so.
First things first. Wild thing. It is a very good thing.
Second things second. If you still want to DB your way back into the M, IMO dating of any kind that merits the name (I don't consider sitting at the diner counter with a woman you know from the tennis club to be a "date") is going to render that immensely more complicated. Just as the presence of OP changes the way Walkaway perceives her/his marital environment -- "I could leave and still be okay!" -- it's going to change the way you perceive your DB'ing.
Casual encounters -- chatting by the juice bar after a workout -- are super. They do exactly what others say they do -- let you know that you're not Damaged Goods.
My challenge to what you write here: "I can make mistakes too, its okay" is that there are mistakes and then there are mistakes. You can backslide on your DB'ing and that's a recoverable mistake -- it's an open question, I think, whether WAW will let you recover from another woman mistake. It's not fair, but there it is.
So my vice -- the worst vice being ADvice -- is this: Be certain that you have defined your path. There's enough of a Regret Sandwich in the DB process to consume without adding a side order to it.
If your path, as you have defined it today, is to lead back to the M, I would advise against dating, to not practice what I practiced, because I'm rather certain that my Wild Thinging, as it happens, had a decisive impact on STBXMRSSP's evaluations at the time her OM dumped her. And, if you do bust the divorce, and you're back in counseling, that's just ONE MORE THING to have to work through with the therapist, right? They haven't stopped making women that I've noticed, so the world's not going to run out.
If, on the other hand, you have neither desire nor expectation of "going home," then have at them. The best way to get over a woman is to get on top of another one.
